25 Years On, Vietnam Still Haunts

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald.

More than 3 million Americans served. More than 58,000 died. More than 2,000 are still missing.

About 3 million Vietnamese died. About 300,000 are still missing. A million were poisoned by 20 million gallons of herbicide dropped on their land.

One U.S. presidency was ruined, another doomed, another bedeviled to this day.

Numbers tell the story of the Vietnam War, but not the whole story. For that, one must look deeper into the heart of darkness, at the scars still borne by two nations, slow to heal and never to be forgotten. One must look at the generations of Vietnamese babies born deformed; at the countless American families come to grief, torn by fighting or refusal to fight; at America's lost innocence; at the cynicism that has yet to dissipate.

Twenty-five years ago, on April 30, 1975, the war ended with the fall of Saigon. But it lives on in memory, in shattered and wasted lives, in the politics and foreign policies of the two nations most shaped by it.

Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" was a victim, for he could not wage war and build a utopian society simultaneously. His inability to choose between them strained the U.S. economy, damaged race relations, aroused an angry populace and made him a failed, embittered, one-term president.

Richard Nixon's downfall, traced directly to Watergate, can be traced indirectly to Vietnam, to the turmoil it provoked on the streets and campuses of America, and to publication of the Pentagon Papers, which led Nixon to establish the White House "plumbers" and set the stage for the hotel break-in that mushroomed into America's worst political scandal.

Even the Clinton presidency, in a sense, has been a victim of Vietnam. The "culture wars" that rage on, often with Bill Clinton at their center, had their inception in the Vietnam era, as anti-war sentiment became entwined with other social causes. Cities burned, and U.S. politics divided sharply into extreme liberalism and extreme conservatism. To this day, we are hard-pressed to find or maintain a middle ground.

Yet America beats on. Despite the pain, the divisions and the ever-insistent tug of the past, we have emerged as the Cold War victor and the strongest and most prosperous nation in history. We've learned to avoid long, drawn-out wars in faraway places. We have not so well learned to get along, but we're working on it.

Vietnam's relationship with what it calls the "American War" remains much more intimate. We took the bad memories, loaded them aboard the helicopters fleeing Saigon and internalized them, for better or worse. Not so with Vietnam. For the Vietnamese, the physical reminders are everywhere, and sometimes they draw blood. Adults and children continue to be killed or maimed by previously unexploded bombs and land mines.

And then there is Agent Orange. Vietnamese officials have long blamed the toxic defoliant for a rash of illnesses and birth defects that appeared in the 1970s and '80s. Even now, soil, water and human-tissue samples reveal high concentrations of dioxin, a component of Agent Orange that is considered one of the most toxic substances on earth.

The U.S. government long ago agreed to compensate Vietnam veterans suffering from the effects of Agent Orange. But, fearing a flood of litigation, it still refuses to acknowledge the chemical's devastating legacy for the Vietnamese people and their environment. And while the United States pays up to $5,000 a month in supplemental veterans' benefits to its Agent Orange victims, Vietnam, one of the world's poorest countries, can offer only about $5 a month to its own.

That may change. Defense Secretary William Cohen said last month that the United States would be willing to finance and conduct joint Agent Orange research with Vietnam, which might help resolve the issue once and for all. But many in Vietnam say that's useless, that the effects of Agent Orange are obvious, that the money should be used to help the victims.

They have a point, but the research is also important. The United States should find a way to do both. That would be a good way to bury some of the ghosts that still haunt both countries.